The city of
Oulu, located on the Northern part of the Baltic Sea, was founded in 1605, and today is the sixth largest city of Finland. Here on September 24-29, 2002 eighteens puzzle teams from all over the World
gathered to compete in puzzle solving. This
World Puzzle Championship was held by Suomen puzzle-harrastajat Ahaa! (Finnish Puzzle Association Aha!).

GAMES Magazine celebrates its 25th anniversary! Every two months a lot of very interesting things can be found in their issues: puzzles, games, reviews, articles, contests. Every puzzle and game lover know this World's most renowned magazine, and eagerly awaits on every next issue full of fun and puzzling. Our warmest congratulations to all the GAMES folks. Happy Birthday!

Next year the 2nd World Rubik's Games Championships will be held. The 1st World Championship was held twenty years ago - on June 5, 1982 - in Budapest, Hungary, at the Vigado Concert Hall. Minh Thai of USA was the winner of that Championship.

"This time we are expanding the Championships to include not only the 3x3x3, but the 4x4x4,5x5x5 and all other Rubik's Games. World Records will be set and broken during the two day event." - the Organizers say.

To see all the details visit the
official site of the 2003 World Rubik's Games Championships.

Ivars Peterson writes in Science News about the complexity of sliding block puzzles.
"In recent years, sliding-block puzzles have served as proving grounds for novel motion-planning strategies. They have also attracted the attention of computer scientists interested in the fundamental limits of computation - for example, in determining the relative running time or amount of memory a computer would require to solve various types of demanding problems in their most difficult form." - he writes.

Then Ivars continues: "One sliding-block puzzle that has played a starring role in several recent research efforts is Rush Hour, a commercial product first distributed in the United States in 1996. A player starts with rectangular blocks shaped like cars and trucks, each in a given location on a square tray, and figures out a sequence of moves that frees a target vehicle from the traffic jam and gets it to the exit."

The
whole article contains a lot of great
and precise observations on the matters, including a big reference part.

The 2nd annual IPP Puzzle Design
Competition established to promote and recognize innovative new
designs of mechanical puzzles was held in conjunction with IPP22 with
judging and awards in August 2002 in Antwerp, Belgium.

The organizers proposed a very rich program with a lot of memorable excursions across Belgium and the Netherlands, and of course fantastic puzzle events full of puzzles and puzzling in every imaginable forms. Fantastic job!

This new puzzle competition is starting by Cihan Altay at: http://www.otuzoyun.com/.
PQRST is a quarterly (January, April, July and October) online puzzle competition open to everybody. PQRST 01 starts on 13 April 2002 Saturday at 8:00 PM (GMT +02:00). The test has a dozen of different rules; see details at:
http://www.otuzoyun.com/pqrst/.

Each PQRST test includes 10 puzzles of different kinds downloadable as a pdf file at the exact time of the competition. Each puzzle will have an "answer key" provided to check your answers (if you solve the puzzle you'll get the correct key).

The solvers have exactly seven days to submit their answers and ratings to all puzzles via answer page. All the results for every PQRST will be posted within one week after the deadline.

Two segments were recorded with Martha trying to solve some of the nineteen puzzles that Jerry presented. Martha was amazing at solving Sam Loyd's Buttonhole Puzzle, but needed help with
the “T”
Puzzle. She was interested in three puzzle vessels, several of Harry Eng's impossible puzzles, the Vanishing Leprechauns, several Kamei take-apart puzzles, the four-piece jigsaw puzzle and others.

The Martha Stewart Living Television program appears weekdays on the CBS network throughout the USA and parts of Canada. In Los Angeles (KCBS), New York
(WCBS), San Francisco (KPIX) and Boston (WBZ) the one hour program begins at 9:00 am local time. However, in other cities the broadcast time varies widely, so please check your local newspaper or TV Guide.

On April 15, 2002, the cast of
MTV®'s Real World/Road Rules Challenge will face "The Rush Hour Challenge." The members of the show will participate in a life-size version of the popular game Rush Hour®, the traffic jam puzzle that turns gridlock into a
game - complete with real cars.

The creators of the show partnered with the Saturn™ Corporation to create a life-size Rush Hour®. Members of each challenge team will take turns attempting to drive one of the cars to the exit on the game board. Eight other cars on the game board block their path to the exit. The teams will race against the clock to see who can make it out of the mess in the least amount of time without destroying the cars.

Tune in Monday, April 15, 2002 at 10PM to see which of the teams make it out of Rush
Hour®!

The city of Oulu was founded in 1605, and today is the sixth largest city of Finland. Oulu has Finland's second largest university and many public and private research institutes.
The region has rapidly growing high technology industry. Oulu, located on the Northern part of the Baltic Sea, has good communication links to the largest European centers.

The organizer of the 11th World Puzzle Championship is Suomen puzzle-harrastajat
Ahaa! (Finnish Puzzle Association Aha!).

The first puzzle event of this year was the first New York Puzzle Party organized by Tom
Cutrofello. It was held on Saturday January 26, 2002 at the Trevor Day School.

There was a lot of puzzling and puzzle fun at this first NY Puzzle Party.
Frans de Vreugd from the Netherlands was giving interesting lectures on puzzles from China and Mongolia. The NYPP was
nice and successful.